The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [130]
Iggie and Jiro went on holidays together. Venice, Florence, Paris, London, Honolulu. And in 1973 they went to Vienna. It was the first time Iggie had been back since 1936.
Iggie takes Jiro to stand outside the Palais where he had been born. They go to the Burgtheater, to the Sacher, to his father’s old café. And when they return, Iggie makes two decisions. They are connected. The first is to adopt Jiro as his son. Jiro becomes Jiro Ephrussi Sugiyama. The second is to revoke his American citizenship. I asked him about this return to Vienna, and his return to becoming an Austrian citizen, thinking of Elisabeth’s journey round the Ring from the station to find the broken lindens outside their childhood house. ‘I couldn’t bear Nixon’ was all he said, catching Jiro’s eye, changing the subject, moving the conversation as far away as he could.
It makes me wonder what belonging to a place means. Charles died a Russian in Paris. Viktor called it wrong and was a Russian in Vienna for fifty years, then Austrian, then a citizen of the Reich, and then stateless. Elisabeth kept Dutch citizenship in England for fifty years. And Iggie was Austrian, then American, then an Austrian living in Japan.
You assimilate, but you need somewhere else to go. You keep your passport to hand. You keep something private.
34. ON POLISH
It must have been in the 1970s that Iggie pasted little numbers onto the netsuke, drew up a list of what they all were and had them assessed. They were surprisingly valuable. The tiger was the star.
This is finally when the netsuke carvers regain their names and start to become people with families, craftsmen in a particular landscape. The stories start to settle around them:
Early in the nineteenth century there lived in Gifu a carver named Tomokazu, who excelled in making netsuke animal figures. One day he left home lightly clad as if he were going to the public bath, and nothing was heard of him for three or four days. His family and the neighbours were greatly concerned about what had become of him, when suddenly he returned. He explained the reason for his disappearance, saying that he had intended to carve a netsuke of a deer and had gone into the depths of the mountains, where he watched intently the way these animals lived, eating nothing during the whole time. He is said to have accomplished the intended work, based on his observations in the mountains . . . It was not rare that a month or even two months were spent in making a single netsuke . . .
When I go to my cabinet I find four small tortoises climbing on each other’s backs. I look up the number on Iggie’s list and it is by Tomokazu. It is made from boxwood, the colour of a caffè macchiato. It is very small, and has been carved so that when you roll it in your hands you feel the slippery tortoises struggling over one another, round and round and round. As I hold it, I know that this man did look at tortoises.
Iggie made notes on the queries by scholars and by a dealer or two who came to see the collection. Why should anyone think that signing a piece simplifies matters? Signing is the start of questions of Byzantine complexity. Are the strokes done with authority or are they hesitant? How many strokes have gone into a character? Is it enclosed within a border? If so, what is the shape of the cartouche? What about alternative readings of the characters? And, my favourite, a question of almost scholastic profundity: what is the relationship between a great carver and a poor signature?
I can’t cope with